Hanna

With Ready pushing all other movies out this weekend, filmgoers this weekend have very little choice if they are not enamored by Salman’s swagger. Hanna was the only Hollywood movie releasing this week and we figured it couldn’t be worse than Ready. Turns out, it isn’t – but not by much

Hanna is a 16-year old teenage girl, being trained by her father in a remote frozen corner of Finland. She has been there all her life, getting coached in foreign languages, learning to hunt, fight, and survive by her dad Eric, a rogue CIA operative. She has never seen civilization and neither has she been in contact with anyone else – no friends, nothing. And she is yearning to go out to the real world – to satisfy her curiosity about things her father reads out from an encyclopedia every night – and to fulfill her mission for which she has been training all her life

Soon she gets her wish and she reaches the real world – but finds her dad hasn’t trained her enough, when she meets a touring British family – who’s daughter is her age and she makes her a friend.

Partly a thriller and partly a humanizing story of a trained assassin-child, the makers of Hanna have given away most of the story in the trailer itself. Meaning, it has a two-line plot – which can more-than-easily be compressed into a 60 sec trailer. And that was the movie’s biggest failing. It has good action sequences – and the opening scene in the frozen artic was very eye catching, but the rest of the movie is just too simple. You keep on waiting for that giant twist you know is coming, because surely the movie cant be so straightforward. Yet after 100 min, when the end credits roll, you find yourself really disappointed

The movie touches nicely on the surprise to Hanna when she makes her first contact with fluorescent tubelights, tv and fans etc, but that angle isn’t explored much beyond that. On the flip side, the director has a penchant to shoot segments in slow-mo, capitalizing on the very unique soundtrack by The Chemical Brothers. It comes across as trying very hard give the film an arty look. Overall, not worth spending your money on. Catch some of the previous weeks releases if you can.